Marxist concepts of colonialism

[Agathor]

I'm researching an essay on colonialism for university and my first task is to collect the various interpretations and definitions of colonialism, imperialism etc. I'm particularly interested in how Marxist historians saw imperialism as developing through Antiquity, the Middle Ages, to the present. My first impression is that pre-capitalist conquerors often made few changes to the lands they took over further than replacing hostile lords with friendly lords - everything was run in much the same was as before (although there are a few cases of large segments of the population being enslaved) but under capitalism it involved radically redesigning the economy of the colonies for subserviance: so, destroying Indian textiles, forcing Haitian farmers to produce animal feed for US multinationals rather than food for the local economy etc.

Am I in the ballpark?

[Let's Get Free]

Well, the colonial subjugation of Africa and the Americas and the enslavement of African people financed the rise of the European empires, as understood by the classical economists, including Marx.

It was through slavery and colonialism, through the extraction of immense quantities of natural resources, and most particularly through the institutionalization and elaboration of techniques for the exploitation of mass labor at a previously inconceivable levels that the apparatus was synthesized for the accumulation of wealth on grand scale. Slavery was a "massive global business" that worked out a system of modern capitalism.

As slavery developed, an extensive system of Africa-related trade developed as well. Sugar became a commodity accessible to the popular classes in Europe, not just the elites. The interplay of sugar and tea trading and other agricultural products were dependent on mass labor and plantation systems of cultivation. Hence the interconnection of the Americas and Asia under European colonial auspices. African colonies too became huge trade markets, as multi-lateral trading circuits and mercantilis economic figures took hold. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, extractive enterprise in Africa developed prodigiously. Mining and cultivation took various forms using both enslaved labor and peonage systems. Latecommers to the colonial racket, most notably the Belgians and Germans, implemented genocidal means of extraction.

[l'Enfermé]

Marx wasn't a classical economist though, comrade. Marx actually was the one who coined the term "classical economics" to refer to the political economy of Ricardo, Mill, and their predecessors. Classical economics was Marx's starting-pointing but that doesn't make him a classical economist, no more than he was a Hegelian because Hegel was his starting-point philosophically. He dethroned and succeeded classical political economy and Hegelianism.

[Agathor]

Does anyone have any further reading on colonialism? The Raj would be good, but also Roman, Moorish or Byzantine.

[Invader Zim]

I'm researching an essay on colonialism for university and my first task is to collect the various interpretations and definitions of colonialism, imperialism etc. I'm particularly interested in how Marxist historians saw imperialism as developing through Antiquity, the Middle Ages, to the present. My first impression is that pre-capitalist conquerors often made few changes to the lands they took over further than replacing hostile lords with friendly lords - everything was run in much the same was as before (although there are a few cases of large segments of the population being enslaved) but under capitalism it involved radically redesigning the economy of the colonies for subserviance: so, destroying Indian textiles, forcing Haitian farmers to produce animal feed for US multinationals rather than food for the local economy etc.

Am I in the ballpark?

If you over emphasise one school of historical through you won't do well. Essays are supposed to demonstrate the student's grasp of the historiographical issues, originality of thought in analysing those issues. the ability to form a cogent view on those issues and then present that view in a stylish, balanced and well formulated argument. Over playing the Marxist school of the historiography, or writing a 'marxist' analysis of the topic will get you nowhere. At least not in this country, I don't know what US history departments want, but I doubt it is very different.

[Drosophila]

On Colonialism - collection of articles by Marx & Engels (http://www.amazon.com/Marx-Engles-On-Colonialism-Karl/dp/0898756812)

[Geiseric]

What was done to Mexicans and Native Americans by the U.S. could be classified as colonialism as well. But if you want the gist of colonialism, look up what the Belgians did in the Congo. That was basically a model that was followed by most imperialist states.

[hetz]

Any comments?


Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

The British rule in India

[Agathor]

If you over emphasise one school of historical through you won't do well. Essays are supposed to demonstrate the student's grasp of the historiographical issues, originality of thought in analysing those issues. the ability to form a cogent view on those issues and then present that view in a stylish, balanced and well formulated argument. Over playing the Marxist school of the historiography, or writing a 'marxist' analysis of the topic will get you nowhere. At least not in this country, I don't know what US history departments want, but I doubt it is very different.
I'm not planning on writing a Marxist interpretation of a particular aspect of medieval colonialism (I'm not a Marxist, so I wouldn't), or an encyclopedia entry which neatly documents the positions of the historical schools. I simply noticed that the argument I'm forming is very similar to stuff lecturers mention in passing as the positions of Marxist historiography and I'd like to have these arguments in full. I was hoping someone would be able to reference a book.

[Agathor]

On Colonialism - collection of articles by Marx & Engels (http://www.amazon.com/Marx-Engles-On-Colonialism-Karl/dp/0898756812)

Much obliged - I'll see if the library has it.

You don't have anything more contemporary though do you?